According to The Book Of General Ignorance by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson, the technological use of the term "bug" existed long before the famous incident in which a moth shorted out a Harvard supercomputer in 1947. The word was used to mean a fault in a piece of machinery as early as the 1800s, and it appeared with that definition in Webster's dictionary in 1934. The moth incident was merely a coincidence that brought the metaphor to life.

Indeed, Grace Hopper's log entry is a gleeful lampshading of "bug in the system."

A lot of technological devices are subject to this trope. Possibly the best example is the mobile telephone: devices that a modern observer would recognize as such have been in limited use since the 1950s, and the basic idea is much older than that. New tech appearing on the market is less often the result of a new idea and more often a new way to make an old idea economically feasible. Mobile phones hit the general consumer market in the 1980s and 1990s, but the first true mass-market phone that launched the device into the ubiquity it enjoys today was the Nokia 5110 (nicknamed the "brick") launched in 1999. The term "mobile phone" itself was first attested in 1945.

A wealthy character uses a car phone in a 1960 episode of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour. (The episode in question concerns Lucy accidentally giving the man an exploding cigar, and then desperately trying to retrieve it before he smokes it.)

The movie Sabrina (the original 1954 version) shows Bogart's wealthy character using a car phone.

There's a British newspaper cartoon from the 1920s based on the fact that people were predicting mobile phones to become commonplace. Rather incredibly, it accurately predicts the social faux pas of mobile phones going off in awkward moments such as "at the theatre" and "at your wedding"!

The cell phone dates to the 1980s. The mobile phone dates back much further; a CB radio is, after all, a telephonic device that is mobile. In Saving Private Ryan, the Tom Hanks character is seen using, depending on your point of view, either a small radio transmitter, or a large mobile phone.

The ham radio practice of "phone patching" was another pre-cellular mobile phone concept.

The first vending machine dispensed holy water when a coin was inserted. It was invented by a Greek named Hero of Alexandria who lived at the same time as Jesus. Born AD 10, died AD 70.

The same guy also invented the first steam engine that we know of. Again, first century AD.

Steam engines were actually invented by the Greek mathematician Hero of Alexandria in the 1st Century AD. Called the aeolipile, it was more a curiosity than anything else. Steam engines were already in use in James Watt's day, but they were very inefficient and tended to explode. Watt made a modified version of steam engines already in use, which became the sort of steam engine that the Industrial Revolution ( and Steampunk ) were built on.

The first intravenous injections by hypodermic syringe took place in 1760.

CDDA were released stateside in 1983, overseas in 1982, the main push to develop it branched off from the first mass-market optical format (the LD analog videodisc,) which was made public in 1972 and released in 1978.

A device similar in principle to a modern fax machine was patented in 1843, before the invention of the telephone.

The first commercial use of fax technology was in the 1920s; by 1927, newspapers were using fax to transmit photographs from Europe to North America. In 1939, subscribers in St. Louis could receive their daily newspaper via fax instead of door-to-door delivery. Both the Allies and the Axis used fax to transmit weather charts, maps, orders, and other information. This was all done by radio, not by telephone: North American phone companies resisted allowing fax technology for decades.

The principle by which the microwave oven works was discovered accidentally in 1945 by Percy Spencer, an engineer building radar sets for the US military. The first commercial microwave went on sale in 1947 to restaurants; it wouldn't be for many years that it became popular in the home. This is partly because the original "Radarange" oven was six feet tall and weighed nearly half a ton, and needed water cooling. One of the larger consumers of the device was, in fact, the US Navy, who found that ovens without hot coils that could start fires were quite useful on their ships.

The first cash-dispensing machine was put to use in New York in 1939. It was unpopular though, and shut down after six months. ATMs returned in 1967, the first in London.

In fact, the lyrics of the Rupert Holmes song Answering Machine, which hit the charts in 1979, shows that many of the cliches associated with such machines — getting cut off in the middle of a message, two people playing "phone tag" with each other because they're never at home when the other one calls, etc. — were already sufficiently well-established in pop culture that a pop artist could safely write a song about them and assume everyone who heard it would get the point.

Especially anyone who watched "The Rockford Files". It used an answering machine in its opening credits, starting in 1974.

Many features of race cars; rear-engined cars were around in the 1930s, wings were being used on some cars in the 1950s, ground effects in the late 1960s, carbon brakes in the 1970s. Usually the innovative Lotus designer Colin Chapman gets credit for most of them and also 'inventing' on-car advertising, not just in F1 (where that was the case) but over the whole world. Such branding had been going on in the USA almost since cars were invented.

Carbon fiber was first used by NASCAR racer Junior Johnson in the late 60s, who had a connection in the aerospace industry. He was only briefly allowed to use carbon brakes because they would glow red from use, prompting officials to ban it fearing it would cause a tire fire.

Writer Harlan Ellison tells a story about his meeting Poet Laureate Carl Sandburg at a party in Hollywood in 1951. When he encountered Sandburg, the poet was in a side room at the party, surrounded by an open book, a roll of white butcher's paper, and a fountain pen/inkwell set. Sandburg would read from the book, scribble something down on the paper, tear the piece of paper off, and add it to a pile. When Ellison asked the legendary poet what he was doing, Sandburg looked up, smiled, and said, "Did you know, young man, that the typewriter was invented in 1829?" Turns out that a publisher had offered Sandburg quite a bit of money to republish his book of poems In Reckless Ecstasy... but wanted to do the poems in "the original longhand." Sandburg, it turns out, had used a typewriter when he originally wrote those poems in 1904, so he was copying his own poems onto paper because there was no "original longhand."

Synthetic performance fabrics were around before the Under Armour company was founded in 1995. Performance fabric garments (garments that incorporate a layered weave of a cushion material on top of a wicking material) have been around since the Medieval period, when very rich knights could afford silk/wool blend undergarments — under armour indeed.

First vaccination? 1796 against smallpox. It entailed giving the person the milder cowpox to give them immunity, but...

First, the original testing started around 1770, with 6 different doctors discovering the method entirely independently. But more importantly, there was a method of vaccination before that, but it was more dangerous. This method was common in the 1770s, and can be reliably dated to around 1550 in China. Some researchers believe it goes back even further in India — much further, with some claiming 1000 BC. There are two variants of the Smallpox virus; variola major is hideously deadly, fatal in 20-30% of cases; variola minor is only fatal in around 1% of cases. A bit of infected tissue (a pock) from a sufferer of the lesser variant was placed in a cut on the back of the hand (thus putting it far from the vital organs and less likely to develop into a full-blown case). The subject would thus catch the minor version and gain immunity from the more serious one. Occasionally somebody would die of the vaccination, so it wasn't a treatment to be taken lightly, but it was better than getting full blown smallpox. The cowpox method was better because it was universally nonlethal, and the first example of using one virus to protect against another.

Anti-shipping ballistic missiles, the newest Chinese weapon the US is worried about? Soviet concept from the 1960s.

This happens all the time with computer hardware and software. The mainstream company gets praise for "new ideas" that slightly less known companies came up with. Tabbed browsing in IE7 or Firefox? The very first web browser with a tabbed interface was NetCaptor, which implemented it in 1998. Intel's idea for a dual-core processor? Thank Sun Microsystems for that one. This also has a history of going back to the early days of Microsoft and Apple. The general public has no idea that Douglas Engelbart invented half the things all computers use now (GUI and mice, etc.) back in the 1960s, nor that the Internet began in 1969.

The first virus that spread via modem was called Creeper and spread over ARPANET (the internet's predecessor) in 1971.

As much as it's become associated with it in recent years, the smartphone boom did not originate the term "app", which has been short for "application" in the sense of a computer program since at least 1992.

"The Cloud" isn't new either, just the name is. It's fundamentally the same system in use thirty to forty years ago: all the data is stored on a mainframe, and the users have terminals that can fetch it when they want it.

During the late 70s, 80s, 90s, and early 2000s it made perfect sense to use Magnetic Tape, Floppy Discs, Compact Discs, and, towards the end, a DVD sent by either mail or courier to transfer large amounts of data. It wasn't until 2002 that I had a laptop computer that could be connected to the internet, and that was a $2,200 special order.

Though credit for inventing movable-type printing goes to Gutenberg, a German, he probably got the idea from reports coming to him from China. The system caught on better in Europe because of a more manageable alphabet size, as opposed to thousands of glyphs for Chinese.

The Koreans essentially perfected the system long time before Gutenberg, and used it for the exactly same purpose, while the Chinese usually preferred to carve entire pages for printing.

And the page plate printing, where an entire page was carved on the printing plate was known in Europe already in the 12th century. Gutenberg's innovation was movable type - i.e. every letter was a separate piece and therefore recyclable. It is far faster and easier to set a page from separate letters, print, dismantle the cast and then re-set a new page than carve each plate one at time on separate wood blocks.

Most people aren't aware that the air to air guided missile was first used by the German Luftwaffe in WW2.

The first aircraft carriers saw combat in World War One, with the first country to use carrier-launched planes to attack a ship being the Empire of Japan.

Everybody knows that the German Me-262 was the first jet fighter to see combat, during World War II. Fewer people know that Allied jet fighters, British Gloster Meteors, also saw combat, being used to intercept the V-1s. The first American jetfighter, the Bell Airacomet, first flew in 1943, but did not prove fit to see combat.

The first practical jet, the Heinkel He 178 flew in 1939, and the unmanned Coanda-1910 may have made a short hop in 1910 (although historians disagree whether Coanda may have...embellished the tale in the telling).

The first electrically driven train was first used in the late 1800's.

The world's first repeating weaponry was invented by the medieval China — a repeating crossbow.

Chinese Zhuge Nu (or Chu Ko Nu) itself fits its trope. Its invention is attributed to Zhuge Liang (2nd-3rd century AD). The first known repeating ballista (polybolos) dates back to Dionysios of Alexandria who lived in 3rd century BC.

Polybolos was also the first contraption utilizing a link chain.

Zhuge Nu may be attributed to Zhuge Liang, but he only improved the design. An earlier version was discovered and is said to be from 4th century B.C.

If you owned a Livermore Data Systems "Model A" in 1964 then you owned a modem. If you'd kept it you'd also find that it would still work and could probably load this page, though it might take a while. Here's a demonstration.

Bell came out with one in 1958.

It does take some time with 300 bauds, but it would take even five times longer with the 56-baud protocol that had been in use in telegraphy prior to that. Émile Baudot (from whose name the term "baud" comes from) patented his 56-baud multiplexing teletypewriter in 1874.

An episode of Columbo from the 1970s shows a murderer using a VCR as part of his fake alibi. (He's a wealthy technology buff, and one of the few to own such technology at the time. Columbo only figures it out because the guy is arrogant enough to show off his VCR to the detective.)

The Antikythera Mechanism, an artifact variously described as the world's first clockwork mechanism, first calculator, and first analog computer, was built sometime around 150-100 B.C..

MP3 players have been around since 1998, and iPods have been around since 2001, but the IXI Digital Audio Player goes back even further, to 1979.

Speaking of Apple, their first handheld computer was released in 1993. It was a tablet, no less; Apple also coined the phrase "Personal Digital Assistant" in 1992.

Cornelius' submarine was based on the work of the mathematician William Bourne. Also, the Turtle (the name of the submarine 'supposedly' used during the Revolutionary War) was a total dud, and never actually did anything, and it was left up to the Hunley to be the first successful military submarine, during The American Civil War, albeit at the cost of itself and its crew.

Similarly, semi-submersible boats. While they have received some publicity as of late due inventive drug runners and regional powers with an interest in asymmetric naval strategy, they actually date back at least as far as The American Civil War, with the Confederate Navy's David torpedo boats.

Huge numbers of inventions actually come from the Middle Ages — the cam, for instance, was invented then, and used, with water-wheels for power, for all kinds of industrial processes from fullering to saw-mills to mechanical wood-pulping, which led to the first large-scale paper production in Western history. The medievals also invented a plow that sliced and turned sod as it went along, and a chest harness that let horses pull much heavier loads. They invented eyeglasses around the 1100s, and in 1010 a monk named Eilmer of Malmesbury flew 600 feet with a hang glider.

Television is both this trope and Newer Than They Think; the so-called "Baird" system was actually invented in the 1880s by a German called Paul Gottlieb Nipkow. (Code discs used to detect the rotation of shafts are called "Nipkow discs" to this day.) Furthermore, the first regular, scheduled public TV broadcasts weren't from the 1939 New York World's Fair — the BBC TV service started three years earlier.

Baird was well ahead of the game once he switched to CRT technology, indeed by 1945 he had demonstrated a 600 line colour TV that used triple-interlacing, a system not actually taken up until the late 60s.

The origins of cable television are Older and More Rural Than They Think. It began in the 1940s as way for viewers in areas with poor reception to get TV signals (a single large antenna would be set up and houses were connected to it). And some people might be surprised to learn the age of some leading US cable networks, like USA (launched in 1971), HBO (1972), TBS (1976), Nickelodeon (1977), Showtime (1978), ESPN (1979) and CNN (1980).

The oil lamp is already known to be an old invention, around for at least centuries, even millenia, but many would be surprised to find that the forerunner to the modern oil lamp is probably the fourth big technological breakthrough of man, after controlling fire, shelter, and clothing. The oil lamp in a primitive form of oily moss in a hollowed out bowl-shaped stone dates back to around 70,000 BC. This means that it predates the wheel, often erronously associated with cave men, by nearly 65,000 years! It also predates the extinction of the Neanderthal by as much as 40,000 years.

Sewing needles have been found in Kostenski, Russia, dated more than 30,000 years ago. They were made of bone.

The first plastic was created in 1856. Granted, it was of such poor quality that plastic was not mass-produced until the early twentieth century, and the earliest plastics would likely be considered hazardous materials today, but it was around in the 1800s...

Drilling for oil originated from China around the 1st century. Though at the time, they started out drilling for salt. They even had derricks made of bamboo that resemble modern ones closely.

Sunglasses, yet again a Chinese invention (although they were just dark glasses at that point; they offered no corrective vision properties.)

Even the Cool Shades trope is Older Than They Think. It's become shorthand for The '80s, but the wearing of dark glasses to look "cool" was being done in the 1950s and possibly earlier.

If the theories of the Bahgdad Battery are correct, then the use of electricity is a lot older than we think, pre-dating Volta's cell by over a thousand years.

Many people think the battery is a relatively new invention, no older than the early 20th century or late 19th century. However, a few clay jars with structures strongly resembling modern batteries (and have been tested to produce an electric charge) known as the Bahgdad Batteries, date back to anywhere from 250 BC to 250 AD. Their use, however, remains unknown (but electroplating jewelry is a good candidate).

Railguns are the height of modern technology, right? Really futuristic, technical and...Wait, no, they were first patented in 1918.

Spam is much, much older than the Internet. The dentists Maurice and Arnold Gabriel sent out hundreds of unsolicited telegrams advertising their services in 1864; in the modern times it is also known as "junk mail".

For many years, it was believed that Public Key Encryption was invented in 1976 by Diffle and Helman. In actual fact, it was invented in Britain three years early by James Ellis, Clifford Cocks and Malcolm Williamson who were working at GCHQ (the British equivalent to NSA). As their work was heavily classified, it was not until 1997 that this could be revealed.

Color photography has actually existed since the 19th century and by the early 20th century colored photos were possible in comparable quality to the photography of the 70s. It was not too common until then just because it was very expensive and the equipment often unwieldy, yet color photos exist from WWI, the Russian Empire and The Great Depression.

In addition, the first commercially avaiable blue LEDs were put into the market in the 1990s: They were the among the first produced in 1907.

The first open heart surgery was performed in 1893.

First fully automatic multi-barelled gun, capable of firing 7200 rounds per minute (impressive even for today's standards) was a Fokker-Leimberger aircraft gun designed in 1916. It was abandoned only because wartime substandard ammunition was causing jams.

Electric instruments were introduced in the late nineteenth century, the first being Thaddeus Cahill's Telharmonium. It was, in all regards, a room-sized synthesizer.

Also, there are recordings of purely electronic music that sounds like something a surrealist would have made no earlier than the 1970s that happen to be from 1913.

The first motorbike was Daimler-Maybach Reitwagen built in 1885. Its creators considered the concept a dead end however and abandoned their invention focusing on cars instead. Boy, they were wrong.

Electric cars are a futuristic concept, right? Wrong. They even predate ones powered by internal combustion! In 1828 Hungarian engineer Ányos Jedlik built an electric toy car. The first electric car capable of carrying a person has been demonstrated in 1881 by Gustave Trouvé in Paris and until 1890's electric cars became quite popular. Some people were even sure that no one will be interested in the 'dangerous' internal combustion engines. Combustion however proved to be better alternative due to the low efficiency of early electric engines and batteries.

Henry Ford bought an electric car for his wife because his Model T, like all early internal-combustion-engined cars required a hand crank to start—a dangerous task needing much brute strength. It was not until the invention of the electric starter, which made driving accessible to the general public, that the electric and steam-powered car disappeared.

Leonardo da Vinci inventednote Not built the following: tanks, robots, calculators, solar power, and parachutes, along with many other things.

Those cool looking machine guns in Modern Warfare must be pretty high tech, right? Well, The first truly automatic weapon, the Maxim gun, was invented in 1884, and the most advanced 21st century assault rifle works the same way as the Maxim gun. There have been improvements in material, but the method in which they load and fire hasn't changed in 120+ years. Oh, and electrical gun sights? Patented in the year 1900, and used on military aircraft as early as 1918.

Many gun operations can be attributed to John Moses Browning. For example, the current machine guns (M2, M240, and M249) used in the US military? They stemmed from Browning's designs. In addition, pretty much any semi-auto handgun in production today incorporates the recoil-operation of the Browning designed 1911.

Similarly, multi-barreled rapid-firing firearms are well-used on the modern battlefield, such as the Vulcan Cannon carried by many western fighter planes or the Phalynx Anti-Air 30mm cannon designed to shot down incoming missiles. Based very closely on the design of the Gatling Gun, circa 1862. Of course, Gatling did that himself, patenting the idea of an electrically-powered Gatling gun back in 1893, with a rate of fire of 3,000 rounds per minute.

And General Electric put the idea into practise in 1946 as Project Vulcan. They borrowed a 1906 vintage Gatling from a museum, equipped it with an electric motor, and the Minigun was born. The 40-year-old museum piece was able to fire 5,000 rounds per minute - almost twice the Gatling's estimate.

Ford is often misattributed as having introduced mass production to automobile manufacture. The company was simply the first to use an assembly line, which it borrowed from meat packing plants; The first mass produced car was the curved dash Olds, which was introduced six years before the formation of Ford Motor Company.

Ford borrowed his assembly line design from James Taylor, an engineer, who was tired of seeing three people taking a break while only one was working. His design, Taylorism, is very close to Fordism, the main difference being that Ford cared about his employees - better pay, more time off, etc. (this is pretty standard today and it's accepted that taking your employee's well-being into account boosts productivity, but it took Ford to show that). Then in the '80s came Toyotism, created by an engineer at a Toyota factory (that also used Taylor's system), which made the employee responsible for his machinery (if the machine breaks down, the employee has to repair it himself).

Two concepts Ford used is older than the Industrial Revolution. Interchangeable parts (where you can take parts from one unit and use it in another)? Honore Blanc managed to make several muskets which can use each other's parts in 1778. Eli Whitney also did so in 1801 though manufacturing parts didn't happen until the mid 1800snote Weapons at the time were handcrafted and thus, its parts were not interchangable. Mass production? Happened during the Civil War when tens of thousands of weapons were needed in a short time, and they were made.

Multi-stage rockets fitted with explosive warheads, shaped exhausts and delta wing stabilizers? Look no further than Conrad Haas's Wie du solt machen gar schöne Rakette, die da von im selber oben hinauff in die hoch faren (How can you make very nice Rocket that can travel high and far) written around 1550. Same rockets with chemical, biological and incendiary warheads? See Kazimierz Siemienowicz's Artis Magnae Artilleriae pars prima (Great Art of Artillery, part one), published in 1650. The concept was also by no mean obscure, as the latter has been a most popular European artillery handbook for the next two centuries.

Explosively formed projectiles have their place in modern anti-tank weaponry, but were not even invented as such. They were discovered by R.W. Wood investigating a fatal accident caused by one dynamite detonator that got in stove with coal. An empiric observation that slightly caved ones work better was used for many years without knowing they actually shoot a grape seed sized hypersonic "bullet" along the stick.

You know those slowly spinning balls covered in a bunch of mirrors? You probably know it as a disco ball. Well actually, they date back to at least the beginning of the 20th century, where they were used for fancy dances.

Using computers as dating services did not start with the rise of the internet in The '90s. It has been around since 1941, and originally used paper forms that were input into a computer.

One of the first wristwatches was owned by Elizabeth I, meaning the first wristwatches existed in the 1500s.

The Carthaginian navy used serial production in the 3rd century BC. The process was reverse-engineered and adopted by the Romans during the I Punic War (264-241 BC).

The heavily abbreviated txt spk used in instant messaging and celluar phone texting? Dates back to the 1800's with telegraph operators chatting to pass the time at work.

People may think that BlackBerry or Nokia invented the smartphone. It was actually IBM back in 1992.

The term "smartphone" is also older than most think, most people assume it was coined in the 21st century, but usage of it dates back to 1997.

Although cassette tapes are most identified with The '80s, they were actually introduced in The Sixties. The misconception has arisen because it was not until 1985 that sales of cassettes outstripped those of phonograph records - and, sadly, the honeymoon was a short one, since compact discs (CDs) were being mass-marketed only two years later.

CDs are also most identified with The '90s, but were actually introduced in 1982.

Jello shots were allegedly invented by Tom Lehrer in the 1950s as a way to smuggle alcohol into the Army base he was working in at the time, but a recipe for "Punch Jelly" can be found in "How To Mix Drinks, or The Bon-Vivant's Companion", a book of cocktail recipes published by bartender and ur-mixologist Jerry Thomas in 1862.

When you picture cameras in the 1900s, you probably picture the bulky cameras that need to be seated on a tripod in order to take pictures properly. True, they had those. However, the 1880s saw Kodak develop a portable camera for consumer use. The 1920s saw the development of cameras which look no different from modern cameras in both function, size and portability.

Selfies - self-portraits taken using either cameras held at arm's length or aimed into mirrors - are seriously thought by some to be a brand-new innovation brought about by Twitter, Instagram and the smartphone. In truth, selfies of the exact same type being taken today are known to have existed at least since the start of the 20th century, if not earlier. In some cases the image quality (exposure, focus) is even superior to those being taken today. The only difference is the ability to distribute such images instantly.

In all likelihood, Selfies have been around as long as there have been mirrors. Even painter or drawer can do a selfie if they're patient enough. Here's◊ a 1960 painting by Norman Rockwell looking at himself in the mirror while painting himself - a triple selfie.

In the 2000s decade, a number of cable operators began promoting the "new" ability for owners of DV Rs to watch one channel while recording another, and of setting DV Rs to record multiple channels at different times. Ignoring the fact that owners of VHS and Beta recorders had this ability as far back as the early 1980s (and indeed it was the major selling feature back in the day when people used to have to make a choice to watch one show or another, with no guarantee of rebroadcasts later). This ability was lost when these selfsame cable companies introduced new tech that removed the ability for people to watch one show while recording another or set multiple-channel recordings.

Anyone who is a fan of Top Gun can tell you that the F-14 is pretty much the fighter jet of the 1980s. Not many of them could tell you that the F-14 served in the Vietnam War (specifically, two squadrons of F-14s provided air cover during the evacuation of Saigon at the very tail end of the conflict.)

The invention of incandescent light bulbs are generally attributed to Thomas Edison, though the idea behind them goes back to at least 1802, when Humphry Davy of the Royal Institution of Great Britain used the (then) world's most powerful battery to heat a strip of platinum into incandescence. Edison can claim credit for perfecting light bulbs, however. He outsold all his competitors due to the superior quality of his bulbs, which is probably why he gets the credit for "inventing" light bulbs.

Windows 8 wasn't the only Windows that was lambasted for its radical GUI change as Windows 95 received some concerns and criticism for a radical GUI change: the introduction of the Start Menu.

The titular Götz von Berlichingen referenced bellow in Terms and Phrases has an iron prosthetic hand. Their history goes back centuries.

Götz von Berlichingen lost his right hand in the siege of Landshut 1516. He had made himself a working prosthetic hand with which he could use sword, cooking utensils, dress and even use quill for writing. The prosthetic hand is still extant.

In the 00's, GMC introduced an Envoy with a sliding roof and remarked on their innovation in print ads. Shortly afterward, Car And Driver pointed out that Studebaker had the same feature on a station wagon in the 60's. The exotic and now defunct Avions-Voisin◊ did it back in 1934.

In the mid-80's, government regulations forced auto manufacturers to install a third brake light into their cars. The folks at Chrysler probably had a good laugh since they had used third brake lights on their cars in the 40's. (Although theirs were mounted on the trunklid instead of the rear window.)

The Toyota Prius was the first highly fuel-efficient passenger vehicle, right? Wrong. Geo/Chevy had the Metro and Honda had the Civic CRX in the mid-1980s, easily achieving 50+ mpg in city driving simply by using smaller engines and more efficient transmissions. And they cost less than the average subcompact.

If you ask someone when was color photography invented, a typical answer would be something like "I don't know, maybe in the 50's?" The answer would be correct, except that it refers to the wrong century. Color photography was first developed in the 1850's.

In-line skates go back to the late 18th century, predating parallel roller skates. They were revived as "Rollerblades" in the '80s.

There is evidence that neanderthals used glue to fix points to their spears.

A lot of kids nowadays seem to firmly believe that they are the first generation of children to have wide access to videogames. Until they get thoroughly schooled by their own parents, who were playing 3rd generation SNES console games or the like back in the 90s. And of course videogames are considerably older even then that.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles might have just recently made headline news, but such devices may have been in use since the 1840's. Accounts state that Austria attempted to bomb Venice with pilotless balloons that dropped bombs. Remote-controlled pilotless vehicles have been around since 1916, with A.M Low's "Aerial Target". Not long after, the Hewit-Sperry Automatic Airplane made its first flight, which was intended to be used as a "flying bomb" against zeppelins. So already, we have our first radio-controlled UAV, our first cruise missile and our first anti-aircraft missile. Drones have since been in continuous use in many armies across the world, one of the more infamous examples being the V-1 "Buzz Bomb". Drone production also shaped film history: A young woman named Norma Jeane Mortenson was assembling Radioplane drones in a factory when she got her picture taken by Army Air Force photographer David Conover on June 26th, 1945 as part of a job assigned to him by his commanding officer. This was how Norma launched her career as a model and film star, later taking the stage name Marilyn Monroe. The man who had David take those pictures as part of a morale-boosting photo-op? Ronald Reagan.

Almost every unique attribute of the Heckler & Koch G3, such as the "HK Slap" method of reloading, is near-universally attributed as originating with or being solely unique to the MP5submachine gun based on its action, due to its more widespread use.

The first smart phone was the IBM Simon and was released in 1994.

Broadcast television in the United States is about a decade older than most people think. The National Television System Committee (NTSC) published their standard in 1941. By that point the UK had already started broadcasting five years earlier (though they stopped doing so during World War II, of course). (The technology is even older—electrical television had been around since the early 30s—but didn't become viable until a universal standard for broadcasting and receiving was set). In both cases the adoption of the technology was slowed down by the Second World War. Production of sets in both countries was halted, and the BBC stopped broadcasting so the signal couldn't be used to guide German bombers. Stations did continue to broadcast in the United States (in fact they were required to broadcast a certain number of hours of content a week or risk losing their license).

Smelting metallic ores to extract pure metals first occured during the Stone Age sometime before 6,000 BC. Of the seven metals known to antiquity, only gold and silver are commonly found in their elemental form. The other five (mercury, lead, tin, copper, and iron) usually need to be extracted from ores. Ötzi died in the Alps circa 3,300BC. Timewise, that's close to when Stone Age became the Bronze Age. The copper in the axe found with him is 99.7% pure. His hair also contains large amounts of copper and arsenic. Some of the earliest bronzes were copper-arsenic alloys.

One of the first commercialized optical mouse was Mouse Systems PC Mouse, debuted in 1986.

Modern dry cleaning has its origins in the "dry scouring" process patented by Thomas L. Jennings in 1821.

Although not technically "dry" cleaning because of the use of water at the end of the process to rinse away the dirt and cleaning product, the ancient Romans had fullonicae, large buildings where slaves would use ammonia and fuller's earth to whiten cloth.

Certain people dislike the idea that Google is going to launch an app that allows you to control your household objects from long distances because it would let them allow to control your house, but it was not even the first company to come up with that idea. BENELUX company Electrabel had already made such an app in 2011. One has to wonder why they did not get the same criticisms (not that they do not have a vocal hatedom though, but for other reasons).

Stealth bombers tend to be thought of as a late 1980s and onward thing. But the first stealth bomber was the Horten Ho 229 of 1944. It was a flying wing just like the modern B-2 (but much smaller), and made largely of wood with glue intended to help absorb radar waves. While this was quite primitive compared to modern stealth materials, the same is true of the radar it was designed to defeat. Modern testing has shown that the Ho 229 would've been very effective if it had made it into combat.

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